#Customer Exchange Programmes
“When they saw the results, they started calling.”
-Joseph Kajerero, Cofounder of Sanitation Africa
Joseph Kajerero has been facing intense skepticism by his customers for decades. Whether it was teaching cow farmers to use artifician insemination, or his current project of selling better toilets to rural communities, this skepticism has been a constant. Overcoming that barrier has required carefully creating customer exchange programmes to show skeptics just what these products had to offer them.
#Skeptics into Promoters
Demonstrating a product seems pretty obvious, but when you begin to talk about doing it at scale, suddenly things become impossible. When it came to showing that artificial insemination for cows was a far superior method for breeding, Kajerero couldn’t go to each and every farm and spend days or weeks overcoming farmers’ skepticism about the technique.
Even when Kajerero gave free kits to encourage farmers them to try it out, they showed superficial enthusiasm and then never used the kits. A different technique was needed to convince them. Kajerero turned to one thing farmers do trust: other farmers. He worked hard to get a single farm to use his products. Then, once the benefits could clearly be seen on that farm, he flew in 80 other farmers to see the results.
This was a turning point. Once those 80 farmers realized there were huge gains to be made through artificial insemination, they eagerly adopted it. At that point, each of those farmers became their own example, showing to their neighbors that they too should consider it. In effect, Kajerero transformed skeptics into mini-promoters by showing them practical examples of his product’s benefits.
#Leveraging Media
“We were overwhelmed by the calls and emails we received, and just before we received a called from a manager who said 'I’m sitting on 52K famers who want you to provide for us maybe half that number.” They were willing to prepay."
-Musenga Siliwawa, Founder of Spot Agro
When trying to promote his fertilizer equipment in Zambia, Musenga Siliwawa had a similar challenge. He created a great product but he needed to create much more demand, so he could leap from his small university production facility to full-scale manufacturing. He resorted to a combination of media and practical on the ground demonstrations. He began by using the attention he attracted by being on the shortlist for the Africa Prize 2013 to get the attention of national media.
He invited a district commissioner to come try the product out on national TV. The response he got astonished him, with an almost immediete order of around 25K units by a customer who was willing to prepay for them. Still, that was only the start, television coverage wasn’t going to reach all farmers, Siliwawa needed on the ground demonstrations to prove his product to them.
So he turned to showing the product at trade shows, tech fairs, and colleges around Zambia. These were the kind of places that more innovative farmers were more likely to go, so the product attracted heavy interest from early adopters who are often models for other rural farmers.
Finally, and crucially, Siliwawa brought the product to agricultural co-ops around the country so anyone who was interested could come see it for themselves without having to travel far. Doing this meant not selling his first few precious units. But, those units worked better showing farmers what his product could do than simply being sold right away.
“We go to the distrct agriculture office, ask the senior office to ask the extension officer to contact the farmers. It’s a chain of command down to the heads of the co-ops who inform their members about the meeting and demonstration.”
-Musenga Siliwawa, Founder of Spot Agro
A nice side benefit was getting to interact with these farmers as potential customers and learn more about what they’d like from the product. In the process, they were converted into real believers. Farmers found it hard to be skeptical when viewing a demonstration and especially when they were allowed to try the product out for themselves.
For both Siliwawa and Kajerero, customer skepticism has been overcome in a big way. For Kajerero, it has been by changing cultural norms around a product and employing excellent promoters. For Siliwawa it was all about getting his product into the hands of farmers and letting word of mouth do the rest. Today, both have increasing demand and growing companies to show for their efforts.
Can you relate to the stories we told here? How is your experience different? We’d love to hear from you. Your questions and comments are what will help us make better lessons in the future.